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This volume contains essays that examine the work and legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. The essays reappraise the ideas of this key group of English thinkers who served as a key link between the Renaissance and the modern era. The contributors examine the sources of the Cambridge Platonists and discuss their take-up in the eighteenth-century. Readers will learn about the intellectual formation of this philosophical group as well as the reception their ideas received. Coverage also details how their work links to earlier Platonic traditions. This interdisciplinary collection explores a broad range of themes and an appropriately wide range of knowledge. It brings together an international team of scholars. They offer a broad combination of expertise from across the following disciplines: philosophy, Neoplatonic studies, religious studies, intellectual history, seventeenth-century literature, women’s writing, and dissenting studies.The essays were originally presented at a series of workshops in Cambridge on the Cambridge Platonists funded by the AHRC.
Often neglected by historians today, the seventeenth-century philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists were recognised in their time as some of the most influential and controversial philosophers in England. Whereas most studies of the Cambridge Platonists have discussed their later careers, this book focuses on their early, formative years at Cambridge during the English Civil Wars. Samuel M. Kaldas explores how the Cambridge Platonists addressed issues central to philosophy of religion as we know it today through their engagement with early seventeenth-century religious controversies about predestination, the character and nature of God, and the role of reason in religion. His study serves as an accessible introduction to both the Cambridge Platonists, and to English religious controversies that contributed to the birth of the modern philosophy of religion. At the same time, Kaldas provides context for and fresh insights into the Cambridge Platonists' intellectual development and the coherence of their thought.
Notwithstanding their neglect in many histories of ideas in the West, the Cambridge Platonists constitute the most significant and influential group of thinkers in the Platonic tradition between the Florentine Renaissance and the Romantic Age. This anthology offers readers a unique, thematically structured compendium of their key texts, along with an extensive introduction and a detailed account of their legacy. The volume draws upon a resurgence of interest in thinkers such as Benjamin Whichcote, 1609–1683; Ralph Cudworth, 1618–1688; Henry More, 1614–1687; John Smith, 1618–1652, and Anne Conway 1631–1679, and includes hitherto neglected extracts and some works of less familiar authors within the group, like George Rust 1627?–1670; Joseph Glanvill, 1636–1680, and John Norris 1657–1712. It also highlights the Cambridge Platonists’ important role in the history of philosophy and theology, influencing luminaries such as Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Leibniz, Joseph de Maistre, S.T. Coleridge, and W.R. Emerson. An Anthology of the Cambridge Platonists is an indispensable guide to the serious study of a pivotal group of Western metaphysicians and is of great value for both students and scholars of philosophy, literature, history, and theology. Key Features The only systematic anthology to the Cambridge Platonists available, facilitating quick comprehension of key themes and ideas Uses new translations of the Latin works, vastly improving upon faulty and misleading earlier translations Offers a wide range of new perspective on the Cambridge Platonists, showing the extent of their influence in early modern philosophy and beyond.
This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike.
Ramism and the Reformation of Method explores the popular early modern movement of Ramism and its ambitious attempt to transform Church and society. It considers the relation of Ramism to Reformed Christianity and its development as a divine logic attuned to understanding both Scripture and the world. In doing so, it reveals how Ramists rejected the notion of a philosophy or worldview independent of God and sought to encompass everything under an overarching Christian philosophy indebted to Franciscan ideals. The supreme goal of the Ramists was the remaking of the world in the image of the Triune God.
"For over two centuries, consequentialism has been among the most influential approaches to ethics and public policy in the Anglophone world. It is often seen as the paradigmatic rational and secular ethic. In The Best Effect, Ryan Darr reveals that a consequentialist approach to ethics is not, as is often assumed, self-evidently rational once religious morality is stripped away. Rather, consequentialist morality itself had to be invented. In this new account of the origins of consequentialism, Darr traces the development of this new consequentialist morality, revealing its decidedly theological history. The Best Effect portrays the emergence in the mid-seventeenth century of the consequentialist moral cosmology, a richly theological vision of a world created by a consequentialist Creator, through to its eventual breakdown in the early eighteenth century in the face of a new version of the theological problem of evil. The book concludes with an intervention in contemporary debates about consequentialism in both religious ethics and moral philosophy, arguing for an alternative approach to teleological ethics"--
Platonism has played a central role in Christianity and is essential to a deep understanding of the Christian theological tradition. At times, Platonism has constituted an essential philosophical and theological resource, furnishing Christianity with an intellectual framework that has played a key role in its early development, and in subsequent periods of renewal. Alternatively, it has been considered a compromising influence, conflicting with the faith's revelatory foundations and distorting its inherent message. In both cases the fundamental importance of Platonism, as a force which Christianity defined itself by and against, is clear. Written by an international team of scholars, this landmark volume examines the history of Christian Platonism from antiquity to the present day, covers key concepts, and engages issues such as the environment, natural science and materialism.
It is well known that philosophy has a history that spans over more than two thousand years. It is less known, however, that the discipline narrating philosophy's past emerged much later, namely in the 18th century. That new discipline was called 'history of philosophy'. The German historian and theologian Johann Jacob Brucker (1696-1770) had a decisive influence upon the formation of this new discipline through his Latin work Historia critica philosophiae (Critical history of philosophy), which was first published in 1742-1744, and which came out in a second edition in 1766-1767. To Brucker it was paramount to define history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline, and not merely as a historical discipline. In order to achieve this, it was vital to define the new discipline's object and explain which material should be included or excluded, and it was crucial to define an interpretative and philosophical method to be deployed on the material selected. Brucker's Historia provided these definitions in the opening chapter, in the present volume translated as the 'Preliminary Discourse', where he also outlined a global scheme of periodization and geographical regions. Moreover, he put his own precepts to practice in the remaining part of the work, which accounted for what he regarded as a global history of philosophy from the beginning of the world up till his own times. The second chapter translated in the present book, 'The Socratic School', illustrates the hermeneutical consequences of the method laid down in the 'Preliminary Discourse', but it also offers a unique insight into the 18th-century understanding and evaluation of Socrates. In quantitative terms, Brucker's Historia was the most extensive account of philosophy's past produced in the 18th century. It was cited and paraphrased in the most authoritative encyclopaedias and histories of philosophy produced in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and its key concepts were often transferred to histories of philosophy produced outside Europe. For this reason, Brucker's Historia has exerted an enormous influence upon historical consciousness among Europeans, but also among peoples living outside Europe. The present book provides first-time English translations of parts of Brucker's work.
The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.